It’s been a while since my last post; a longish assignment in Jakarta and the trials and tribulations of first time home ownership seem to have led my attentions elsewhere. Being overseas did give me the opportunity to sell a client on some new and interesting technology though - in this case, Alfresco’s Alfresco 3 / Alfresco Share web-based collaboration suite. Our client (a large intergovernmental organization headquartered in Jakarta) was interested in replacing a legacy document management system that had fallen into disuse. SharePoint was of course bandied about, amongst other things, but I ended up prototyping a beta of Alfresco Share:
Share combines social media capabilities like blogs and wikis with powerful search and an intuitive interface. Best of all, it has SharePoint Protocol Support. To Word or PowerPoint, Alfresco looks like a SharePoint repository, allowing Office suite programs to use Alfresco as if were speaking to SharePoint This has some interesting implications for organizations that want to move away from MOSS or WSS to something that’s open source, flexible, and relatively inexpensive (or free, if you can forgo support).
With Share, Aflresco steps into the Enterprise 2.0 suite category, a market niche that is getting a lot of attention lately. But, Alfresco’s differentiators here - that it has powerful ECM underpinnings, that prior revisions have been tested in the enterprise, and those users that are used to being able to use SharePoint document libraries are still able to do so – set it apart from its competitors.
For anyone out there that is heading down the E2.0 suite path, download their quick installer and give it a whirl. It’s worth a close look.
10 responses so far ↓
1 austin wheelock // Oct 28, 2008 at 9:15 am
Thanks for sharing more about the Alfresco beta you implemented recently. Can you offer up the response from the client? Are they moving forward with this implementation? Does it meet all their needs? Were there compromises in functionality? What were the gotchas in Alfresco’s product, if any? What was the biggest challenge technically (not user related)?
2 Jay Hariani // Oct 28, 2008 at 11:02 am
Hi Austin - Sure. The client was very positive about the way the product’s capabilities and ease of use. The biggest challenge will be overcoming the organizational issues related to increasing transparency and knowledge sharing.
They are moving forward with the implementation - the implementation is slated to start around the first of the year.
They felt like it met the vast majroity of their needs. Since they were expecting MOSS-esq functionality, and Alfresco provides SharePoint’s features as a subset of their overall feature set, it got close.
One of the compromises with Alfresco is that, although it provides SharePoint client support, SharePoint developers can’t develop against the platform. This will be a shift for any organization that has invested a significant amount of money in building applications that run on top of SharePoint.
The larges technical challenges will be getting Active Directory integration to work and integrating Alfresco’s internal search with other enterprise search products, at least in my opinion.
3 Saqib Ali // Nov 10, 2008 at 2:34 pm
In understand that Sharepoint might be an overkill for some businesses, but there are other collaboration suite (e.g. Confluence) that have connectors for Sharepoint. Was an analysis performed to compare these alternate opensource solutions?
I am new to this area, and am looking for a collaboration suite (wiki, blog, bookmarking etc) for a non-profit organization with minimal IT support.
Your guidance will be appreciated.
4 Jay Hariani // Nov 12, 2008 at 6:42 pm
I’m a big fan of Confluence - I worked to deploy it at my firm. But, the client’s requirement in this case was more around managing a large set of Word, Excel, PDF and image documents, and less around creating content online (where Confluence excels). SharePoint + Confluence may have fit the bill, but wasn’t looked at specifically.
5 Dan Keldsen // Nov 24, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Jay - your sense for the WCM side of Alfresco’s capabilities? And further, are you seeing Alfresco use within your clients as purely inward-facing (intranets?) or customer-facing? (or some combo of course - but primary use cases are my interest)
Cheers,
Dan
6 Jay Hariani // Nov 25, 2008 at 10:34 am
Dan, my sense is that Alfresco WCM is still more closely integrated with their old interface - you don’t see much of it in Share except for the ability to publish blog posts internally and externally.
In regards to where the it gets positioned, I’d say that Alfresco lends its self especially well to the role of an internal platform. The flexibility of the tool allows it to take on some fairly one-off internal processes, approval routings, etc. The social media features that they’ve added in Share push it even further in this direction.
7 Dan Keldsen // Nov 26, 2008 at 12:16 am
Jay - thanks for the response, much appreciated. Lines up with my sense as well. Neither good nor bad news, simply that the general focus is internal facing, more ECM than WCM.
Best,
Dan
8 Lisa Hillmann // Nov 27, 2008 at 9:28 am
Jay - while we are waiting for the client roll-out, we have been beta-testing our own Alfresco Share platform for the project. The Labs version seems to have better functionality than the Enterprise version, but it is really buggy. Parts of the sites seems to break at random (i.e. one of the wikis has stopped accepting edits, it will no longer let you search the sites). And the community of users and Alfresco programmers on their forums are not particularly active or responsive. Any thoughts?
9 Jay Hariani // Dec 1, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Lisa - Community supported software can have both upsides and downsides. If you would rather not dig deep into the technical underpinnings of the application, or aren’t satisfied with the community support options that are available, I’d suggest paying for professional support.
10 Jim Brown // Dec 21, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Jay,
Why didn’t they just use SharePoint if they wanted SharePoint functionality?
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